At INFODAD, we rank everything we review with plus signs, on a scale from one (+) [disappointing] to four (++++) [definitely worth considering]. We mostly review (+++) or better items. Very rarely, we give an exceptional item a fifth plus. We are independent reviewers and, as parents, want to help families learn which books, music, and computer-related items we and our children love...or hate. INFODAD is a service of TransCentury Communications, Inc., Fort Myers, Florida, infodad@gmail.com.

April 19, 2012

(++++) BABIES AND BUGS

On the Day You Were Born. By
Debra Frasier. Harcourt. $17.99.

The Beetle Book. By Steve
Jenkins. Houghton Mifflin. $16.99.

Choose your
beauty.There is nothing as gorgeous as
a newborn child, and one of the traditional gifts for the parents of newborns,
for the past 20 years, has been Debra Frasier’s On the Day You Were Born.The
book is as lovely and sentimental now as it has been since 1991, and the new
edition includes Frasier herself reading the work on a CD, which also contains
music by Matthew Smith and singing by Sara Brown.The enhancement is a bow to changing tastes
and technologies but is not really necessary: this celebration of a new human
life, in which Frasier imagines the whole world acknowledging a baby’s birth
and conceives of the world as literally moving around the newborn little one,
is as wonderful as ever even without the disc.The prose throughout rocks gently: “While you waited in darkness,/ tiny
knees curled to chin,/ the Earth and her creatures/ with the Sun and the Moon/
all moved in their places,/ each ready to greet you/ the very first moment/ of
the very first day you arrived.”The
remarkable thing about Frasier’s book is that parents know it is written for
the mass market, just as they know that there are many, many babies born every
day, yet the book seems as individual and personal as does their very own
precious new arrival.The atmospheric cut-paper
collage illustrations add to the feeling that this is both a fairy tale and a
special story of the real world, with a spectacular impression of the Sun’s
“towering flames” taking up most of one page and, on another, a flying kite
lending an up-close view of the process by which “air rushed in and blew
about,/ invisibly protecting you/ and all living things on Earth.”In fact, On
the Day You Were Born is as much a celebration of Earth as it is of every
special child upon it – and it is a book that grows as children do, with the
final pages of “More about the World around You” offering information that
babies will appreciate as they grow…while the personal entries that many
parents make in their copies of the book (and which Frasier encourages) guarantee
that On the Day You Were Born will
become a family heirloom for those who want to turn it into one.

Heirloom status is
less likely for The Beetle Book, but
there are beauty and a celebration of Earth in Steve Jenkins’ work as
well.Although this book is not for
parents who are squeamish about small six-legged creatures, it will be
fascinating for everyone else: “Line up every kind of plant and animal on
Earth,” Jenkins explains, “and one of every four will be a beetle.”Using the same paper-collage technique
employed by Frasier, but in a very different way, Jenkins creates gorgeous,
oversize models of many, many kinds of beetles, from the ordinary-looking clown
beetle to the huge-jawed giant longhorn beetle to the bizarre Indonesian beetle
with its long, tubelike snout.One page
explains how beetles interact with the world; another shows their parts and
explains that all “are constructed on the same basic blueprint” even though
they look very different from each other; another shows the ways in which
various beetles have adapted to specific environments.The colors are absolutely wonderful here –
actually, beetles’ iridescence can even exceed what Jenkins shows, but his
contrasts between the orange-and-black forest fire beetle and blue-and-yellow African
jewel beetle are certainly impressive.The
way beetles fit into the environment is clearly explained, whether the insects
are pests like the cotton-attacking boll weevil or helpful creatures like the aphid-eating
ladybird (ladybug) and the dung beetle, without which “the world’s grasslands
would soon be buried in animal droppings.”Familiar insects, such as the firefly, are shown along with peculiar
ones, such as the giraffe weevil – which has a long neck with a joint in the
middle.Colors, disguises, habits, size,
motion – all are here.The Beetle Book will scarcely make fans
of people who dislike bugs of all kinds, but it can be a wonderful introduction
to an important part of Earth’s web of life for children who have not yet been
taught to fear the creatures that make up so large a part of the world we
share.